


Family

by miss_slothrop



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Baby Gottlieb is older now, Gen, Internal Monologue, Post-Movie: Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-29
Updated: 2018-09-29
Packaged: 2019-07-18 23:26:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16128890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miss_slothrop/pseuds/miss_slothrop
Summary: Hermann returns to his home in Germany in the wake of the events of Uprising to get his thoughts in order.





	Family

**Author's Note:**

> After seeing Uprising on release day in theaters I needed to get this idea down. It was originally posted on my writing Tumblr "miss-slothrop-writes." All descriptions of Vanessa Gottlieb are in line with what little Travis Beacham gave us to go on when asked about her, but since their child was never described at all I took my own liberties there.
> 
> In addition to being a highly experimental departure from my usual style, this story is also completely un-beta'd. A rarity from me, but nobody else I knew had seen the movie yet and I wanted it out in the world as soon as it was done.

Hermann goes home after it’s all over. He knows what’s coming and needs to be with his family when it hits. He gets out of the back of the car himself, rolls his suitcase down the walk and stops just short of the door to his house when he hears the lock turn from inside. He meets eyes with Vanessa when she steps out, putting just one bare foot over the threshold to move toward him. Her look gives him fair warning and he braces for impact as she throws her long, lovely arms around him with a sound that might be a sob. He leaves his suitcase standing by the wayside as he returns the embrace, fighting his own tears as the scent of the coconut oil in her hair washes over his perception.

_She doesn’t know yet._

The thought makes Hermann shudder in his wife’s arms despite her warmth. It sparks an old memory of Newton meeting her for the first time, mouth slightly agape as he shook her hand for too long. That day, for once in his life, Hermann had failed to suppress the giggle the sight stirred in him. It had been one of the first signs he’d made a note of that his old ways of being were changing.

_Had it already started then? Had they already started to infect Newton? To whisper in his ear?_

Hermann’s breath hitches and Vanessa pulls back to look at him again. She smiles and he can’t help but smile back, leaning in for a gentle kiss. She speaks in her melodious, resonant voice that hums like music in his chest. She welcomes him home, making a joke about how she had no time to arrange for proper fanfare for her hero’s return. Hermann answers that he needs no reward for simply doing his duty, but Vanessa gives him a look with pursed lips that tell him she isn’t buying it. That she can see right through him.

_I have to tell her. He was a part of her life, too. She has a right to know._

Hermann opens his mouth to speak again but the excited cry of “ _Vatiiiii!_ ” cuts him off. Ada, his gem of a daughter, comes running from her room at the back of the house with footfalls that shake the floor so loudly for a child of ten years. The thick web of curls atop her head, rivaling her mother’s, bounces in the wind of her approach. She’s still wearing her school uniform, though without its jacket. Hermann wastes no time in thought as he drops to his good knee, catching the charging girl in his arms and hugging her close with a sudden burst of joy. It’s difficult to feel any other emotion around his Ada. Since she was tiny she has been love and wonder personified, tender-hearted and eager for more and more to learn.

_She also needs to know, though knowing may destroy her._

Hermann rocks from side to side holding his daughter, a stream of enthusiastic words pouring from her mouth as she tells him how much she missed him and how happy she was to hear he was coming home finally and how many wonderful things she was learning in school that she wants to ask him more about.

_Such a beautiful child she is. But I don’t want to keep this secret from her. It isn’t right._

Hermann promises to listen to all of her questions in the coming days. His return to the PPDC isn’t assigned a concrete date yet. Before, such disorganization would drive him mad, but there is room in his mind for it now.

_Room Newton made. But at what cost?_

He tells Ada to change clothes and get washed up for dinner. She nods her head and obediently runs off toward her room again. She’s always this compliant when he’s just come home, but surely enough she’ll be defying him again by end of week. It’s always the same pattern, almost down to the exact number of days every time. Vanessa had rolled her eyes at him when he told her he’d been keeping track. Like clockwork, he’d said with deliberate bluster just to see her trying not to laugh. In fact, he had continued, he’d posited that he could build a mathematical model of Ada’s behavioral pattern to the same level of accuracy that he’d been able to calculate the frequency of kaiju emerging from the Breach.

_How fascinating, what we choose to joke about after times of great trauma. How we humans laugh at that which once gripped us in the tight clutches of fear for our very existence._

Vanessa touches his shoulder, bringing Hermann back to the present.

_What a shame. Right now I would much prefer to remain in the past. Blissfully ignorant._

He lifts his head to look up at her from his crouched position. Vanessa offers a hand and he takes it to steady himself as he rises, placing his cane back under him. She takes his suitcase into the house, to their room, and he follows behind her like a lost dog. Pieces of the scenery of his own house flash into his awareness, past his blinders. New artwork of Ada’s is posted on the walls. The door to his office is open, but the room has barely been disturbed. An old picture of the whole family is askew on the wall.

_The whole family. Including Newton._

Hermann stops to regard it. The time it comes from feels like ancient history now. Ada had just started kindergarten and they had all gone out to eat at her favorite restaurant in celebration. As it happened, it was one of the rare occasions where Newton could take time away from his brand new job at Shao Industries.

_It had to have already begun by then. We were breaking bread with a ticking time bomb._

Hermann touches his fingertips to his face unconsciously. That might possibly have been the last time – if not simply one of the last times – they had all been together. When had Newton last had any contact with Ada? With Vanessa, even? Did Ada even remember him? A litany of mental images streamed through Hermann’s mind of the first year after the war, when Ada was a baby. Newton had been such a regular presence around this very house back then. He’d tried to help the new parents care for their infant while having no knowledge of so much as how diapers worked. When Ada cried he’d been the first to rush to her cradle, his stream-of-consciousness monologues about what the problem could be and what to do about it disturbing her peace even more. Sometimes, when he felt so inspired, he would sing to her.

_Was that really Newton, or was that an elaborate act the Precursors made him put on to look pitiful and sympathetic?_

When Ada had started to crawl and then walk, Newton would let her chase him from room to room, sometimes recording video on his phone. Ada would happily trot off after him, laughing in that bubbly way that babies do.

_As much as I trusted Newton on a professional level in those days, I could never bear to leave him completely alone with Ada. Perhaps that was for the best. More than I ever could have known._

Talking came soon after. Hermann distinctly remembered that Newton had cried the first time Ada had said the word “ _Onkel_ ” in his presence.

_Was that real? Was it truly from the heart?_

Hermann had made Newton swear on his honor as a scientist, the one oath he figured even _he_ wouldn’t be tempted to break, not to teach Ada any dirty words at such a tender age.

_The **real** Newton, being frank. Not some Precursor facsimile parading around in his own body._

Newton had done art projects with Ada, smearing finger paints over paper just as she did.

_And what was that to them? Insight into human child-rearing?_

He would play keyboard for her, teaching her some of the words to songs he knew how to play.

_That music was indisputably Newton. His memories of learning those very chords passed through me in the drift. I could practically predict their order just by listening to him play. In the years since, I have desperately missed their sound, though not enough to take up the instrument myself. No, that wouldn’t provide an adequate solution._

There were innumerable memories in Hermann’s mind of Newton’s bond with Ada in addition to their own. The man had thrown himself so eagerly and readily into the position of surrogate uncle that neighbors had even occasionally mistaken him for one of Hermann’s blood brothers. Until now these memories had been a source of light to him, something beautiful and peaceful to fall back on when his lab felt especially empty without that extra presence in it. Now they made him sick.

_All these years. All that time they were hiding inside your head, Newton. Chipping away at you until you couldn’t tell the difference anymore, or perhaps overwhelming you all at once and absorbing you into their collective mind. Perverting your persona just enough to make you theirs, their perfect key to our world. No one would know. No one but me. And you shut me out the moment you got your first promotion under Dr. Shao!_

A sudden slam jars Hermann out of his own head. He’s hit the wall next to the picture with the side of his white-knuckled fist. Vanessa jumps, halted in her tracks. She still has Hermann’s suitcase. Almost no time has passed.

_Breathe. Breathe. Steady. I’m going to have to explain this._

Vanessa asks what happened as Hermann thinks it. Words fail him as he catches his breath. Finally, after what feels like an epoch of silence, he tells her that he’s tired and unfocused, in need of this downtime. He’d simply tripped walking down the hall, that’s all, and that he’s looking forward to just sitting down at the family dinner table and spending time with the people he loves.

_Only most of them, I realize._

* * *

After unpacking, Hermann helps Vanessa in the kitchen. She protests and pretends to take swings at him with the dish towel, but Hermann insists. He’s spent too long getting his meals handed to him on cafeteria trays, he says, and feels that he should have at least some hand in cooking for the family now that he’s back home. Since gaining more willingness to get his hands dirty, Hermann has also made numerous valiant attempts over the years to become savvy in the kitchen, but most efforts outside of baking, with its carefully-measured mixtures, have failed. Vanessa takes a moment to remind him of this where Ada can hear, sending the girl into a fit of derisive giggles that makes Hermann blush.

_And yet, in spite of that, I can’t help but recognize how peaceful this is._

Vanessa eventually relents after Hermann argues that he isn’t going to learn without making these mistakes and he finds the idea of simply being served by his family distasteful. This house is his home, and by Jove he’s going to pull his weight. He rises up to a greater height and taps the base of his cane against the floor to add emphasis, succeeding in his secondary mission of cracking his wife up yet again. Once she gets most of her laughter out, she gives him another kiss, this one slower and more passionate. In that second, Hermann realizes how deprived he’s been in his time away from her. How much he’s missed this feeling. He tilts his head to one side to deepen their kiss, the bridge of his nose gently bumping into the frame of Vanessa’s glasses. Both of them would likely forget what they were doing before without a sound of disgust from one side of the room reminding them that Ada is still there watching. They separate with a sheepish laugh, opting instead to touch their foreheads together.

The preparations don’t take much longer and soon they’re all three of them at the dinner table just off the kitchen. Hermann marvels silently at how tall Ada looks sitting in the nice wooden chair across from him, but chides her for playing with her food as she starts to stack the baby carrots on her plate like building blocks in geometric patterns. Ada sighs and takes a bite out of one instead. Hermann smiles and is about to go back to eating the delicious-smelling meal he and Vanessa made together when Ada asks him a question and the one name he was hoping not to hear shatters his calm.

“ _Vati,_ ” Ada begins, “did you get to see _Onkel_ Newt?”

Hermann chokes on the food he was trying to swallow.

_No. Please, no. Just a moment longer. I truly was at peace._

“ _Vati?_ ”

Hermann fights to compose himself, clearing his throat too loudly and praying that the tears pricking at the corners of his eyes are only the result of his strong coughing.

_No, I’m not ready._

“Sweetheart,” says Vanessa, the beauty of her voice pushing past Hermann’s growing panic, “are you alright?”

Hermann tells her yes and tries to build up the bravado to back it up, but he can’t steady his breathing. His chest feels like it’s being folded up from the inside.

_No. No, not yet. Not yet!_

His hand is shaking. He tries to hide it behind his back, but they’ve already seen.

_Why did I think that would work? Of all the completely asinine…oh. Of course. The drift._

“I heard the lady on the news mention _Onkel’s_ company,” says Ada. She’s still Hermann’s little angel, but her words drive themselves into his heart like a hot poker. “Was he there? Ooh, did you meet his girlfriend yet?”

_His what? Oh, right. That **thing** they found in the search of Newton’s apartment after they locked him away. Not even hidden! Just left right there in the open like the most grotesque piece of living furniture imaginable._

Hermann remembered the first time he’d ever heard Newton mention ‘Alice.’ It was over the phone during one of the rare moments that Newton thought to casually contact him. Hermann had been overjoyed that his friend had met someone who he seemed to mesh with so well. He’d told Vanessa about it in a call home that same night. Vanessa must have passed that on to Ada.

_Heaven knows where he even got the thing. Last I had heard, there were no more living kaiju brain fragments left. He must have cultured the accursed mass himself, just like everything else he made under Dr. Shao’s nose. And he said he wanted to introduce us. Very clever of the Precursors._

Hermann tries to speak, but no sound comes out. The room feels like it’s closing in on him, stifling him.

_No, please! I was happy! Don’t take that from me yet! I needed more time!_

He’s crying. He can’t deny it anymore. One tear and then another run down his face, a hot sliminess in their wake.

“ _Vati,_ are you crying?”

Hermann can’t take it anymore. He slams his hand down on the table to push himself up, rattling the dishes, and gropes for his cane beside him. He’s out of the room with remarkable speed, Ada and Vanessa’s voices following behind him, asking what’s wrong.

_It’s not their fault. They don’t know yet. I have to tell them. I have to, but I don’t want to. Lord, I don’t want to. I’ll only drag them down with me._

He’s in the front room of the house by the couch, the light of the lamps giving the once-cheery space a sick tinge of artificiality. The colors are the same, the furniture is the same, but no light streams in through the windows. It feels as if the sun had simply plunged below the horizon in an instant. Hermann leans on his cane and focuses on breathing.

_I still have control. If over nothing else, I have control over my own self._

Vanessa’s hand comes to rest on his shoulder and, rather than startle, Hermann deflates. He bends low over his cane as a sob escapes him, his eyes pressed tightly shut. He hears a sniff beside him and manages to look in its direction. Ada is standing there, one hand hovering over his on top of his cane. Tears shine in her eyes as they meet his, fear and concern all throughout her face.

_No,_ mein Schatz. _Please don’t cry, Ada. This isn’t on you. My sweet little girl. You don’t deserve this._

Hermann finally breaks, collapsing onto his knees to take his daughter in his arms again and hold her like something might try to rip her away at any moment. His floodgates open and he cries against her hair and shoulder, wailing like a wounded animal. Vanessa sinks down behind him, embracing both of them together, and Hermann fears he might burst with so much emotion.

_My family. I love you beyond all. I’m sorry you have to share in my pain, truly, but as we stand now we are incomplete. You must be allowed to know the reason. It would be unfair, it would be **wrong,** to keep it from you. I haven’t properly acknowledged this in too long, but Newton was- no, he **is** a part of this family and nothing, not even the full strength of the Precursors’ hive mind, can ever change that._

Slowly Vanessa helps Hermann up as his sobs die down and guides him to the couch, his vision still blurry with tears. She whispers something to Ada and all three of them sit, Hermann sandwiched between his wife and his daughter. For a time everyone is silent, save for Ada’s sniffling, and Hermann can breathe again. Vanessa plants a gentle, loving kiss on his temple and he turns toward her, her eyes speaking volumes on her need to understand. His must also give everything away, Hermann reasons, and he works to find his voice again.

_I knew it would be like this. I’m here right now because I knew. I may have grown and changed in all this time, but I still know myself. I still **am** myself._

He tells them, taking care to explain everything in a way that Ada can understand without sugar-coating any of it. The words catch in his chest and his throat a few times, but Hermann powers through with the determination he’s always had. He stares at the wall across from him or at his knees as he talks, but he can hear Ada’s gasps and Vanessa’s murmured shock as they both shift on the couch around him. At the end of his story, after describing the cell they have Ada’s _Onkel_ Newt chained up in, Vanessa puts a hand on his jaw and turns him to face her, pressing their foreheads together again as she breaks down into tears as well. Hermann takes hold of her arms, perhaps squeezing them too tightly as he starts crying again, feeling Ada hug him from the side and bury her face in his shirt. He releases one hand to draw his daughter closer, to hold his family together.

_Am I next? Newton wasn’t the only one to have drifted with a kaiju brain back then. I still have the dreams. Flashes of what we saw. Is there anything new in them? Are the Precursors calling to me, too? God forbid, will they ever warp me enough to raise my hand against the ones I love?_

Hermann shivers, though he’s hardly cold.

_Was coming home a mistake? Are Vanessa and Ada in danger now?!_

His eyes fly open and he moves to leave, heart racing, but as he pulls away he sees Ada, his darling child, sniff one last time and look up at him. Affection fills Hermann, followed by the protective instinct of fatherhood. He looks upon Ada’s face and sees the little features she’s inherited from him as she grows. Ada smiles weakly at him and hugs him tighter and Hermann can feel his shoulders relax. He turns the other way to see Vanessa, the gorgeous, brilliant woman who chose _him,_ of all the people in the world. Her cheeks are wet and her glasses misty, giving her attempt at a comforting smile all the more power with her effort. Love is the only thing on Hermann’s mind at both sights. Love unbroken and real.

_I am myself as long as I can still feel this. I’m exactly where I ought to be. This is the only place where I can truly know that my mind is my own._

Hermann puts his arms around his loved ones again, drawing them in, and holds them there. They sit in silence again, sharing in each other’s warmth.

_If only we could all be here. If only we had never been pulled apart. Damn the Precursors for everything they’ve done! Damn them for this on top of everything else! Our world was supposed to be safe! My daughter was supposed to grow up in a world without kaiju! My wife was never supposed to fear for my personal safety while I was away at work ever again! Newton…Newton was supposed to stay with us. With our family. With humanity. This was all supposed to be over._

Hermann takes a deep breath in through his nose and releases it with gravity.

_Once I’m back to work, I’ll see to it that it is. I’ll bring you back to us, Newton. By Jove, I’ll bring you back!_

**Author's Note:**

> This movie probably broke Hermann's heart as much as if not worse than how it broke mine. Channeling my own emotions through him was incredibly cathartic.


End file.
